Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
Well-educated people on my Facebook feed, many of whom attended elite institutions of education with me, are advocating socialism. More specifically, they are suggesting that private businesses should make hiring and compensation decisions based on some generally agreed notion of the common good.
I can understand when young adults in their twenties with no memory of the Soviet Union feel this way. But for people my age to not accept as bedrock that this method of economic organization has been thoroughly tested and completely discredited boggles my mind. And yet this is the direction in which we seem to be careening.
Faced with the evidence that pending tax policies and the consequences of the Affordable Care Act are causing businesses to contract, they are outraged. If companies have access to cash, they should use it to pay workers and any negative response to these policies represents political advocacy and unwarranted hysteria. Concerned citizens should abandon larger enterprises and shop locally (incidentally, from merchants whose size relieves them from the burdens of Obamacare).
I can't help but wonder if this is how people felt as Roosevelt's New Deal was unfolding. And I begin to even grant some credence to the notion that were it not for the New Deal, we well might have faced true, unadulterated socialism in this country.
Too extreme? Perhaps. And yet, it stuns me to even be having these debates with supposedly well-educated adults.
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Sep '11
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
In Massachusetts, we have Masshealth; it's insurance for the unemployed or underemployed, but even in MA, nobody tried to tell employers how to provide insurance. Most conservatives dislike MassHealth, but it's a far cry better than Obamacare: it provides insurance to those who otherwise can't get it, but it leaves private businesses alone. I don't understand why Romney didn't point that out.
Jun '10
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
Funny how these liberal-minded "live and let live," "find your own truth" types just can't stand it when a business makes decisions in its own interest or when a conservative tries to speak on a college campus. The leftist orthodoxy trumps all.
Nov '12
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
Trace, sadly most people, even those with some cursory knowledge of what the USSR was, are completely illiterate when it comes to history. Or worse yet, they believed most of the anti-Western nonsense they were "educated" with by liberal institutions - when Anita Dunn is allowed to address a class of high school graduates and say the names "Mother Teresa" and "[Chairman] Mao" in the same sentence without being entirely laughed off the stage, the results are young adults who are confused and completely ignorant of the world they live in.
The moral relativism of this age will rot our culture from the inside out unless good people with great conviction attempt to rescue it by not simply allowing their children to be indoctrinated but by actively participating in their lives and education to teach them the lessons of history.
Nov '11
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
I never think of liberals as live and let live, or conservatives for that matter. Live and let live, if applied consistently, is a libertarian notion.
May '10
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
Yes, that is a whole other post. How the head of a Jesuit (Fordham) University can condemn the speech of a published author (Ann Coulter) so casually, with blanket assertion and no specific evidence, is stunning.
I would rather he told the Republican Group, go ahead but this is going to cost us $X in additional security and overtime costs and you will have to fund the ruckus yourselves, and I am referring all press inquiries to your dorm room.
Apr '12
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
I know scads of folks like this in academia. I remember talking with a student once who ranted about how evil rich people are, then in the next breath she was rattling on about all the wonderful things she and her boyfriend were going to have "when we're rich."
I think of them as "asterisk socialists"--they check the box for redistributionist Marxist ideals because they're convinced there's an asterisk right next to the box that says "doesn't apply to me, just to everyone else."
Sep '12
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
I do not discount the notion that many who lived through the Cold War retain some nostalgia for the Soviet Union - and can never forgive Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II for bringing it down. The journalism profession is infested with such people; they will never publicly admit it, but they are Marxists or Maoists at heart.
Dec '11
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
Education without wisdom is a liability, not an asset.
Edited on November 12, 2012 at 7:24pmApr '11
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
There will be a civil war before true socialism in America.
Dec '10
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
Papa Johns gets more for the free pizzas than they would for the same amount spent on insurance for employees.
Personally, I'm using the boycott list as a preferred fast-food vendor's list. I'll use those vendors until they cave, and not a second longer.
Nov '11
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
I hope I see that tonight on my Facebook feed so I can eviscerate it.
Mar '11
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
I will accept your statement as indicating these individuals are credentialed, yet educated? That is clearly not the case.
May '10
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
Of course. But my point is more fundamental. These are my peers. We watched the Soviet Union and East Germany collapse on itself. We've witnessed the fundamental capitulation of Vietnam and China to human nature. We are currently in the process of watching Europe implode. I just don't understand why today we are having this argument. The answer must have something to do with the level of economic anxiety and the base force of envy.
Roberto
I will accept your statement as indicating these individuals are credentialed, yet educated? That is clearly not the case. · 0 minutes ago
Jul '12
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
There is a difference between how people may have perceived the New Deal programs and today. We should know better today. We have empirical evidence of what the outcome is likely to be, in the 30's it was a relatively new concept
or a new take on an old concept but people didn't really know what would happen. Now we do, but that doesn't seem to matter.
May '10
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
I also consider that we are a victim of our own success. To many well-credentialed individuals now make good livings in areas completely removed from business which allows them to somehow move in educated circles but remain absolutely clueless about how wealth is created (and destroyed.)
Jun '10
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
Fred Cole
I never think of liberals as live and let live, or conservatives for that matter. Live and let live, if applied consistently, is a libertarian notion. · 1 hour ago
Note the quote marks. I was writing ironically. Liberals pay lip service to classical liberal notions, but they're anything but. We can argue about conservatives and liberals somewhere else. The point Trace raises goes to the liberal demonization of business for making business decisions (which is something that I, a conservative, would not do).
Oct '12
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
Hah, the fact they don't understand the difference between giving away 2 million dirt-cheap pizzas to generate recurring sales far exceeding 2 million pizzas and a new and recurring payroll cost that has no ROI is a pretty sad statement.
At one point in Western civilization, Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa while writing about double-entry bookkeeping. Now we have a class of college-educated wastrels who make cheap gifs which misunderstand basic elements of economics - and consider it justice.
Edited on November 12, 2012 at 9:09pmApr '12
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
Sounds like my whole career, working with people who sub-optimize for their own areas, not caring about the business as a whole.
Jul '12
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
Not exactly like the 30's. Men wore more of these
back then
Jan '11
Re: Is This What the 1930s Were Like?
Part of me loves that the wrongheaded spend so much time discussing these things with each other and complaining on Facebook -- that's time they're not spending mucking up something that actually matters.